I wish I had read this after reading Thiong'o's fiction. I will do that someday. This is an account of his childhood in Kenya from 1938 until he enterI wish I had read this after reading Thiong'o's fiction. I will do that someday. This is an account of his childhood in Kenya from 1938 until he enters highschool/secondary school. This is during the time of the Mau Mau Uprising, which had a direct impact on his daily life.

I know people who were missionaries in Kenya directly after this period, so it filled in some gaps for me. Call me naive but I didn't really understand post-WWII colonialism very well. Goodness.

I loved seeing him in the role of songleader and storyteller even from a young age, and I am glad he never gave it up. Another small detail that I will remember most is the naming conventions of children - named after your father but also as a symbol of reincarnation, and then also your nickname that you are better known by. So much of a story built into a name!...more

This was selected as a January/February group read in my Great African Reads group here in GoodReads. So of course I had not read it until now. To beThis was selected as a January/February group read in my Great African Reads group here in GoodReads. So of course I had not read it until now. To be fair, it isn't the easiest book to get a copy of, and I had to wait until mine came in from interlibrary loan.

In The Sand Child, a father is anticipating his eighth child (and eighth daughter) so he declares that the child will be male, regardless of reality. Ahmed is raised as a man and benefits from the various perks of being male in Morocco, from household authority to inheritance. But he also must struggle with concepts of identity, family, and truth.

That's the story as first presented, but then the novel morphs into a reflection on storytelling as the same basic story is told again with different outcomes. I'm still not quite sure I know the "actual" ending, but I also am not sure I care. The language is beautiful - the translator should win some kind of prize - and I would like to share a few bits:

"I do not tell stories simply to pass the time. My stories come to me, inhabit me, and transform me. I need to get them out of my body in order to make room for new stories."

"To be a woman is a natural infirmity and every woman gets used to it. To be a man is an illusion, an act of violence that requires no justification."

"A book ... is a labyrinth created on purpose to confuse men, with the intention of ruining them and bringing them back to the narrow limits of their ambitions."

"I am haunted by my own books."

"A story is like a house, an old house, with different levels, rooms, corridors, doors, and windows. Locks, cellars, useless spaces. The walls are its memory. Scratch the stone a little, hold your ear to it, and you will hear things!"...more

In my attempt to read more from and about Africa, this was a year-long group read with the Great African Reads group. True to form, I kept with the scIn my attempt to read more from and about Africa, this was a year-long group read with the Great African Reads group. True to form, I kept with the schedule up until July, and found myself needing to read the second half this week.

And then. Then I found that Reader, who is not himself African, starts at the very beginning. As in, the formation of the world and the joining of the tectonic plates that would form Africa. Phew! It took a while to get to the people of Africa, as I'm sure you can imagine. But these pieces of information about the formation of the land ended up being crucial to understanding why some parts were sought for ownership, why some were set up to support rapid population growth, and why the very best diamonds would be formed in some of the depths of the earth of these nations.

Once Reader gets to the 19th century, it was as if he flipped a switch and talked about the nations staking claims that they had no right to, and I thought ugh, is it all colonies and empire? He says in passing that Ethiopia was the only African nation not to be claimed by a European country in their own empire building. Wow. I admit, I don't know that much about African history, and that is why I read this book, but that did surprise me.

The author takes the story of Africa pretty solidly up to 1960, although Egypt's role is largely neglected in the 20th century, and while Rwanda gets a mention in the 90s, AIDs is left out (although I learned a lot about rinderpest, and how when 90-95% of the cattle died that allowed the tsetse fly to return, etc.) The author does do a good job at making connections between the ramifications of seemingly small decisions and events, from the importance of rain to the fallout from requiring the people living in Rwanda to declare an ethnic group.

I have a slightly different perspective on Africa since we had missionaries in our home on furlough throughout my childhood. Some worked with the Maasai, some with the Turkana, some traveled furtively and unofficially through countries unrecognized by the USA like Eritrea. I can sing in Swahili and have consumed ugali. But even that perspective is filtered by the imperialism that changed Africa forever. My later training in folklore, fieldwork, and anthropology comes from a field that really came into its own in the 1960s. That field places great importance on the insider perspective, and I want to read the story of Africa from that perspective. I want to understand the people without our framing of tribes and warring people groups. I want to understand their history and everchanging culture from their perspective. That isn't what this book is, but the author knows it. He tries to give an overview of how everything fit together. It is well-researched and documented, but the only African voices we tend to get are those in positions of power. I want the people!

This book brought me to tears, multiple times. I actually had to put a little bit of distance in between finishing it and reviewing it. The author, UwThis book brought me to tears, multiple times. I actually had to put a little bit of distance in between finishing it and reviewing it. The author, Uwem Akpan, wrote these stories to draw attention to the children of Africa and the struggles they face. It is tempting to dismiss it as merely fiction, to reassure myself that people surely do not live this way, but I know too much of the reality to be able to do so. The stories themselves are fiction of course, but pull from very real events. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Be prepared; these are heavy.

Story by story, may contain spoilers:

The Ex-Mas Feast - This takes place in a Nairobi shantytown, where a family tries to plan for holidays when they don't have money for food. Chemicals for sniffing are given as gifts instead. My younger sister went to Nairobi to visit with missionary friends of the family a few years back, and I was reminded of her photos.[image error]

Fattening for Gabon - A story of two children, who already lost their parents to AIDS (they don't seem to understand this), being prepared to be sold into slavery by their uncle. The way it is told, heavy on dialect and food description, almost serves to mask the horror. But then I would stop to realize what was going on, ugh. This story is very long, more of a novella.

What Language is That? - Highlighting the turmoil created in communities by religious groups encouraging violence. Could you explain to a 6 year old why she can no longer see her best friend?

Luxurious Hearses - Another very long story, more of a novella, about people fleeing a violent city on a bus. The main character is trying to hide that he is Muslim because of tensions. I liked how everyone on the bus had to have an opinion about everything, it gave a good sense of the cultures involved and what was valued. It gets more and more violent as the story progresses, and yet I was still hoping for a better end!

My Parents' Bedroom - This is the story I wish I hadn't read. Horribly violent, horrifying, I just can't even recall it enough to summarize it. Ethnic cleansing is something I will never understand. ...more

After signing up for the Around the World in 52 Books challenge for 2012, I ended up in a handful of other groups having to do with world literature.After signing up for the Around the World in 52 Books challenge for 2012, I ended up in a handful of other groups having to do with world literature. This was selected as the November contemporary lead in the Great African Reads group. I'm behind, and then chose to listen to the audio, but I finished today.

First of all - the narrator of the audiobook was wonderful. She has also done some Adichie and I would love to hear her do that. Her accents really brought the story to life for me, particularly for the voices of Lindiwe and Ian.

Sometimes the audiobook was confusing because the way the story is presented. It is in four sections, jumping from one period in time to another. I felt a bit lost at the beginning of each of those sections until enough story was told to catch me up. There was no real reason to jump from place to place except that the author wanted to tell the story of Zimbabwe starting from the Act of Settlement, when the country was renamed from Rhodesia and the period of white minority rule ended, up through the present time. I think she could have done this more effectively if the novel had not all been written in present tense, because it just made it hard to figure out what was going on sometimes. The reader also has to infer what the characters think and feel from what they say or do, because the author doesn't let us in. I would have loved to understand more of what Indiwe was thinking, or even to hear more of the voice of her son David. Indiwe in particular is often doing everything except what is expected of her, but the reader is not as privy to that inner struggle as I'd like!

At the same time, I found enough to keep me interested throughout the book. The interracial relationship at the core of the novel could also be seen as the conflict between old and new Zimbabwe. Seeing how different characters were effected by the changes in their country, and how quickly political movements can change into violent turmoil, was realistically described. I didn't know much about Zimbabwe's history before reading The Boy Next Door, and I feel like I know a lot more now. ...more

When you are poised at the edge of an empire, waiting for an attack, and your crops aren't doing well and you don't know who to trust, tensions can geWhen you are poised at the edge of an empire, waiting for an attack, and your crops aren't doing well and you don't know who to trust, tensions can get pretty high. The Magistrate in this book starts caring too much about the treatment of the Barbarian prisoners and ends up a prisoner himself. Oh and because it's Coetzee, the main character is a man past his prime, obsessed with his fading ability to perform sexually.

I think I was supposed to be more impressed with this book than I was. I did appreciate the lack of place-ness, how this could be in any place in any time, and the obvious (somewhat preachy) concept of questioning who exactly the Barbarians are. ...more